Although thousands of prisoners died at Dachau (~32,000 were documented), Dachau was not primarily a death camp. More prisoners died from malnutrition, over-working, and disease than in the gas chamber. But when walking through the gas chamber and the crematorium area on the same path that unsuspecting prisoners walked, this fact doesn't seem to matter.
(*Disclaimer: The video is shaky because I didn't want to show the faces of other visitors.)
We talk about the Holocaust as the systematic killing of people who were deemed a threat by Nazi party officials. Taking the walk from room to room made this point perfectly clear. Each room had a purpose. Each aspect of the building was intentional. What I experienced was a factory of death, and it's something that I'll always remember.
1. The waiting room
2. The undressing room
3. The gas chamber
4. The room to stack bodies before cremation
The wooden beams used for hangings are visible here. These ovens worked day and night, and as the war progressed, the ovens' capacity could not keep pace with the number of victims. Corpses were stacked in and outside of the crematorium. Dead bodies filled boxcars leading into Dachau. After American troops liberated the camp in April of 1945, they forced German citizens to view the dead.
Sources
If you're interested in seeing photos and videos of the camp during the war and its liberation, you can look here:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Dachau Memorial Site
Third Reich in Ruins (Dachau then and now)
*
My final post will cover the memorials at Dachau.
No comments:
Post a Comment